Consider an entrepreneur, group, company that has something genuinely important to deliver or sell…

With the means to engage in public relations…

Launched on behalf of the truth about the service, product, or idea.

Yes, I know this is a completely foreign concept in our society, where PR is deployed to peddle lies and deceptions from dawn to midnight—but just suppose.

What’s the first mistake good people would make?

My answer is based on my work with private clients. The top two mistakes (it’s a virtual tie) are: they think the truth will stand on its own, like a statue in a park; and they believe being nice will attract wide support.

The first notion is stunningly naïve. The second is based on fear of offending someone somewhere.

Statues mainly attract birds with a sense of humor. Nice is a pretty good sleep-aid.

I have a vivid image of a group going up against a collection of plundering mega-corporations; the TV ad featured a young blonde walking toward the camera across what looked like the floor of a bank. She stopped ten feet away from the lens, her smile unwavering, and spoke a dozen encouraging words in a language I would call Rainbow White Rice.

For the price of the ad, the group could have pushed out a few hundred attack ads on the Web. Oh well. Mustn’t offend.

One of the basic errors here is: believing in maintaining order.

Forget it. Order is whatever the current configuration is. The mass of opinion, belief, feeling, misconception, ignorance, all taken together. The cloud of it. The network of it. The haze of it. The general consensus of it.

That configuration doesn’t know a new idea. It doesn’t want a new idea. Therefore, it must be cracked, dispersed, blown apart.

This takes the willingness and energy to stage a hit on Order.

Not just once, but over and over. With no quarter asked or given.

Yes, at first there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, complaining, moaning, objecting, sobbing, and of course fearing.

Pushback from allies and opponents alike.

That’s part of the deal. It’s what happens when you apply pressure to crack the egg of passivity. People want their order. They love their order. They wear their order. They worship their order. They elevate their order into a cosmic principle.

The word “breakthrough” is self-explanatory.

Of course, there are differences between selling a new product and selling the fact that a massive corporation is destroying life. But we’re talking about degrees of the same thing. You are entering a landscape that doesn’t already contain what you have. You have to put what you have in that landscape and establish it. The prevailing landscape is order. You need to break in and break through.

“Well, I think we can slip our new idea in without causing a ripple. We can package it between two slices of organic bread and leave it on the table and watch the miracle happen, as the universe tells people it’s time to pick up the sandwich.”

This is the Doofus Hypothesis. “Nothing is as powerful as a doofus whose time has come.”

I know several wonderful projects in cities that are supporting authentic health. They’re winning—on a local scale. The people involved work very hard, and they don’t think they have time to engage in public relations. Mistake. There are all sorts of actions they could take to expand their domain, and in the process they would be protecting their own future—because without real PR they’ll stay right where they are and begin to diminish and shrink and wear out and fade. When you run in place long enough, shit happens.

There are a variety of activist groups in the world who are doing great work, but they don’t have a clue about public relations. They will fade. They’ve made one breakthrough to get where they are, but they need to break through on successive levels. They took no prisoners once, but they need to do it again.

Once you understand what intelligent and creative Attack are all about, you see the value of genuine PR. You see it and taste it and feel it. You not only do it because you should; you do it because you want to. Want-to is a sword.

Here’s a standard PR approach for doofuses who think they’re clever. Ask people what they want; then package what you have so it looks like what people want. It’s deceptive. And it doesn’t work in the long run. It doesn’t break through. It doesn’t change people’s minds. They will fail to see what you’re offering. Instead, they’ll see what they already want, and that won’t budge them an inch off the position they already occupy.

Here’s another one. Invoke a higher power as the authority for what you’re selling. We all know about that one. It does work, and it can work for a very long time. But because it’s based on an egregious and fatuous lie, the people who keep launching the lie will turn into grotesque and venal cartoons, and corruption will dribble and leak and flood into their group. The ensuing destruction won’t be a cartoon. It’ll be all too real.

Along a similar line, the old adage about repetition of message in advertising is true; it has legs. But the people who keep launching it lose IQ points like children in an old USSR classroom. They wake up one day, and they’re androids and robots. Once they had college degrees. Now they’re alcoholics who have to look at their drivers’ licenses to make sure they remember their names and birth dates.

Understanding intelligent and creative attack takes time and work. But mostly it involves a shift of point of view. And a shift into a desire that was always there.

I look at people who do Attack Lite, and I see people who want to protect the position they already have. Nothing wrong with that, in theory, but what they already have is eating them up day by day. Degree by degree, blurred edge by edge, it’s sucking the life out of them. Their blood is drying up. They’re fronting for their own unchanging, personal status quo, and soon they’ll be a piece of paper blowing away in the wind.

There is another way to go, and it has both legs and wings.

Intelligent and creative attack.

Intelligent means: you have fact, you have truth, and you know what it is. You know it inside out. You can talk about it. You can write about it. You can persuade with it. You have unshakable conviction. You’re not locked up; far from it. The truth is alive. You can carry it and convey it with life.

Creative means imagination. You can devise and invent ways to present truth that stimulate not only a positive reaction in the audience, but a stirring of their own imagination, an awareness of a space that hasn’t been filled up yet, a space called the open and unwritten future.

And why would you want to do that? Because that’s what everyone is looking for, whether or not they’re consciously aware of it. Everyone wants to climb out of trench and Go. Everyone wants to travel through walls or knock them down.

Everyone wants to do that for themselves. And if you can help them and stimulate them, you’re in a vanguard nobody knows about and everybody is searching for.

Attack has very broad implications. It doesn’t only imply an opponent. It also means projection of new reality, it means power, energy, force, without mincing reluctance—as a sculptor attack stone.

It means something people have been carrying around in their minds and back pockets, looking for a way to unleash it with no holds barred.

And it has something to do with public relations, if you take apart the two words and see what they nakedly mean.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

2 comments on “Public relations on behalf of the truth: what a concept”

Sounds like you’re stating that an individual cannot create a reality that breaks through the order in which PR (basically effective con jobs) isn’t possible. IOW your very premise is rooted in reinforcing the power of one aspect of the current order.

“Here’s a standard PR approach for doofuses who think they’re clever. Ask people what they want; then package what you have so it looks like what people want. It’s deceptive. And it doesn’t work in the long run. It doesn’t break through. It doesn’t change people’s minds. They will fail to see what you’re offering. Instead, they’ll see what they already want, and that won’t budge them an inch off the position they already occupy.”